What A Rush

Year: 2007
Director: Andrew Waller
Cast: John White, Christopher McDonald, Eugene Levy
Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Yup, they kept making these and I'm gonna keep reviewing em. This is the circle of hell I have designed for myself. American Pie Presents: Beta House, which came just a year after The Naked Mile is the only one of the Pie spinoff movies to be a direct sequel, so at least there's that. And it's a sequel to the only film to show even a glimmer of potential, so I'm glad they recognized what they had for that oh so brief time.

Plus, the intervening year at least gave everyone a chance to become just that much hotter.

So, here returns Erik Stifler (John White) and his friend Cooze (Jake Siegel), now at Generic College and ready to rush Beta, the frat run by Erik's cousin Dwight (Steve Talley), his right-hand-man Bull (Dan Petronijevic), and previously unseen party boy Wesley (Jonathan Keltz). We follow their romantic travails with a variety of sorority babes (Erik's girlfriend Tracy, around whom the entire previous film revolved, has dumped him unceremoniously offscreen), but meanwhile things start to heat up with a nerdy rival frat run by tech geek Edgar (Tyrone Savage), who want to see those dumb jocks kicked off campus.

I can't say I blame them.

One thing Beta House benefits from is the fact that almost all the previous cast members have returned. I wouldn't say this is because any of them were particularly good, but we already have a relationship with these characters. Even if that relationship is "they didn't really make an impression on me," it's still easier to jump into this movie without having to meet a whole new slate of bland frat boys.

Of course, this being the same cast of characters also exposes us to their innumerable flaws. Beta House has a fearsomely long run of transphobic jokes to replace (most of) the jokes at the expense of little people that defined The Naked Mile, and there continues to be absolutely no reason that anybody should want to hang out with or engage in sexual congress with Dwight Stifler.

Unfortunately, beyond basic recognition of the people involved, the plot is radically un-engaging. The frat rivalry forms the central spine of the narrative, but the movie must have severe scoliosis, because that plot thread swerves out of reach in favor of a bunch of pointless romantic (read: "sexy") vignettes about all the boys and their raunchy escapades. When the plot finally kicks in with half an hour to go, it's not much better, using a frat Olympic games as an excuse to insert a chain of (admittedly decent) gross-out gags rather than gather actual narrative momentum.

And I think I just liked the beautiful pool more than the challenges themselves.

The gags here were never going to be good, but most of them are built on foundations that make zero sense, and anybody with lived experience beyond high school graduation will instantly clock about a thousand tiny problems with the premise. Fortunately, that excludes the entire demographic of this movie's audience. But seriously, there is an entire scene about how easy it is to make a grown man ejaculate in his pants (spoiler alert: these men clearly have a medical problem), and also a lot of gags revolve around a co-ed bathroom, which just wouldn't happen. It's not a thing, I promise.

And Eugene Levy is really just in this movie, isn't he? I always expect him to show up for a scene and then peace out, but he keeps coming back again and again and again, in further degradation of his established character (apparently now he's a frat legend with a wild sexual history). To be fair, he certainly only spent maybe two days on set, but they really milk every second out of him that they can, and it just resolutely refuses to work.

Beta House is exactly in line with this entire franchise: just watchable enough to be a meaningless diversion, but not worth a single lick of your time. But on the bright side, there's only one of these left! Why am I doing this! Dear Lord, tell me why!

TL;DR: American Pie Presents: Beta House is a pointless, aimless, vulgar movie.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 725
Reviews In This Series
American Pie (Weitz, 1999)
American Pie 2 (Rogers, 2001)
American Wedding (Dylan, 2003)
American Pie Presents: Band Camp (Rash, 2005)
American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (Nussbaum, 2006)
American Pie Presents: Beta House (Waller, 2007)
American Pie Presents: The Book of Love (Putch, 2009)
American Reunion (Hurwitz & Schlossberg, 2012)

Beer Run

Year: 2006

Director: Joe Nussbaum

Cast: John White, Eugene Levy, Maria Ricossa

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Now I know I just started my most ambitious marathon of the year with Tears for Fears, but you didn't think I'd just up and forget about my American Pie spinoff marathon did you? No, we've still got three of those left unfortunately. This time we're hitting up The Naked Mile, from the director of Sydney White, a college frat movie that I actually liked quite a bit as a kid. Let's see if that goodwill carries over, shall we?

I'll give you one guess.

I suppose it's good that canonically the Stifler family is a bunch of f**k monsters, because the way these movies introduce relatives we've never heard of before is alarming and unsustainable. Erik Stifler (John White) is the cousin of Matt and Steve Stifler (the former of which appeared in Band Camp, the latter of which refused to appear in any of these), and has failed to live up to the family name because he's still a virgin. His girlfriend Tracy (Jessy Schram) wants to satisfy his desire to lose his virginity, but isn't quite ready to do it herself yet, so she gives him a free pass for the weekend, a choice she instantly regrets. 

Because nobody communicates in movies, Erik has no idea about this and heads off with visions of sugarplums in his head to visit his cousin Dwight Stifler (Steve Talley) - what branch of the Stifler family tree he has plummeted from is entirely unclear - at his fraternity. Along with his horny friends Cooze (Jake Siegel) and Ryan (Ross Thomas), he gets into all kinds of fraternity hijinks, facing lots of opportunities for sex and not being entirely sure he can handle them.

The parade of nameless women wait in the wings, their divine purpose to aid a man on his sexual journey sated for the time being.

For about ten minutes, The Naked Mile looks like it might just be an actual good movie, landing somewhere between the heights of the first two original films and the mediocrity of an American Wedding. There is a deep commitment to an extravagant gross-out gag that might not be to your taste, but shows a valuable fearlessness on the part of the screenwriters, and the conversations between Erik and Tracy set up a movie with an almost To Do List-esque progressive view on the double standards about men's and women's virginities, with the added bonus of a boy conflicted about being put into a box he doesn't really identify with simply because of the way his family is. And it does come back to it at least a little bit in the final five minutes. But oh, all that chaff in between the wheat...

The instant this film sets foot on a college campus, every ounce of narrative momentum, thoughtful character-building, or whiffs of progressive sensitivity are tossed out the window and left shattered on the side of the road, much like Erik Stifler's phone when his friend casually tosses it out the window so he won't see a message from his girlfriend revoking his free pass. There's so much wrong with this scene that I can't even begin to unpack it (let's hope phones were less expensive then, for one thing), but then again there's so much wrong with the movie proper too.

I reeeally don't want to get into the reprehensible representation of the rival frat as a house of little people, save to say that it's odious and that we need to make a little people remake of Citizen Kane or something to make up for what Hollywood has done to them since the beginning of the medium, or at least The Wizard of Oz on.

Not that I'd trust these guys with... well, any type of film honestly.

Not only is the college material nasty and dim-witted, it's obscenely boring. There is a football sequence that feels like it was shot by Béla Tarr, resolutely refusing to end under any circumstances. And the party scenes are much the same, forcing you through a never-ending gauntlet of mediocre actors adopting rictus grins of good cheer while performing irritating frat antics. It not only doesn't live up the promise of the opening ten minutes, it actively spits on that sequence and poops in its shoe.

And now for the requisite discussion of Eugene Levy. This is where his cameos really start to go downhill. The thin excuse for him being at the camp at least was a tenuously believable excuse, but The Naked Mile is where things actively start to break down his character as established by three movies that actually mattered. For one thing, he seems to know way too many teenagers who are at least six years younger than his own kid, but for another he is positioned as some kind of frat legend, which sacrifices a lot of character continuity just for the joke of a prudish parent being in charge of The Naked Mile. Spoiler alert, I guess, but who could possibly care.

TL;DR: American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile is even more disappointing because it almost seems like it's going to be a good movie until an abrupt heel turn.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 888
Reviews In This Series
American Pie (Weitz, 1999)
American Pie 2 (Rogers, 2001)
American Wedding (Dylan, 2003)
American Pie Presents: Band Camp (Rash, 2005)
American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (Nussbaum, 2006)
American Pie Presents: Beta House (Waller, 2007)
American Pie Presents: The Book of Love (Putch, 2009)
American Reunion (Hurwitz & Schlossberg, 2012)